Modern powerlessness makes living feel like a revocable ration measured by statistics
Evidence
In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve. He does not expect to live out his life to the end. The prospect of violent death and torture, present to everyone, is prolonged in the fear that the days are numbered, that the length of one’s own life is subject to statistics; that growing old has become a kind of unfair advantage gained over the average. Perhaps the life quota allocated revocably by society is already spent. Such fear is registered by the body in the flight of the hours. Time flies. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 178
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: A dense claim that the administered society turns one’s own life-span into a social quota that can be revoked — bodily dread as the registration of statistical, calculable finitude.
- SEED: An essay angle: how life insurance, actuarial tables, and ‘life expectancy’ statistics have made mortality feel like a bureaucratic ration rather than an existential fact.
- XREF: connects to: Powerless hope is the sole precondition for continuing to live — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 149; Modern mankind splits between belief in omnipotence and experienced powerlessness; Austerity is structurally sadistic and anorexic fantasy miscalculating bodily limits — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1972 (+1 more)